The developers of Phalcon made it their mission to develop the fastest and most efficient PHP framework around, and they have done a good job of completing that mission. With the speed of C programming, simplicity of PHP, and the structure of a framework, Phalcon streamlines web application development.
Getting Started with Phalcon is an introduction to using Phalcon to develop web applications. You will learn by building a blog application using Phalcon Developer Tools and web tools to flesh out the CRUD skeleton for the application quickly, and then modifying it to add features.
As features are added to the blog, you will learn how to use other Phalcon functionalities such as the Volt template engine, view helpers, PHQL, validation, encryption, cookies, sessions, and event management.
Chapter 1, Installing Phalcon, covers installing the Phalcon PHP extension on Linux, Windows, or Mac, and configuring PHP, Apache, or Nginx.
Chapter 2, Setting Up a Phalcon Project, covers setting up a project in Phalcon manually using Phalcon Developer Tools or Phalcon web tools.
Chapter 3, Using Phalcon Models, Views, and Controllers, covers the MVC structure of Phalcon.
Chapter 4, Handling Data in Phalcon, covers Phalcon Models in depth, PHQL, session data, and filtering and sanitizing data.
Chapter 5, Using Phalcon's Features, covers even more features in Phalcon, including hashing passwords, controlling user access, setting cookies, and using view partials, logging, and view helpers.
This book is intended for PHP developers who want to learn how to use the Phalcon PHP framework. Some knowledge of PHP but no prior knowledge of MVC frameworks is required.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, path names, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "So, we have to locate the php.ini file and edit it."
A block of code is set as follows:
phalconBlog/
app/
config/
controllers/
library/
logs/
models/
plugins/
views/
index/
layouts/
public/
css/
files/
img/
js/
temp/Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
sudo apt-get install git sudo apt-get php5-devphp-mysqlgcc
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "So, search for the word Compiler in your browser window."
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